The Green Party, Taking Us For Fools

It really is our fault. Yes, you and me, and all the other fools who year after year, decade after decade, keep electing idiots and charlatans to high office. For only fools could fall for the harebrained PR stunts of the attention-hungry careerists who populate our political parties. From today’s Irish Times:

“The national broadcaster RTÉ should be asked to vacate its 30-acre Dublin 4 campus and move into the city centre, under a radical Green Party proposal to alleviate housing shortages in Dublin.

Party leader Eamon Ryan and deputy leader Catherine Martin disclosed the new housing plans at the gates of RTÉ in Donnybrook on Thursday.

The policy proposes the RTÉ site, all five Dublin Bus garages close to the city centre and the glass bottle site in Ringsend be used for high-density housing.

Mr Ryan said the lands in all locations were under-utilised and could be developed into accommodation for 5,000 students and 5,000 others.

Mr Ryan said the changes would allow RTÉ to return to the city centre “where it belonged”, and build modern digital studios near the digital and technology quarters, rather than staying in a Dublin suburb.”

Yes, that’s right. Let’s move RTÉ’s entire, fifty-year old administrative headquarters and studio-complex with its hundreds of staff from a state-owned location in the nearby suburb of Donnybrook, where it has been situated since the 1960s, to a prime development site in the congested heart of Dublin city. Sure what would it cost the tax-payer to construct new buildings or adapt old ones for RTÉ’s dislocated needs? What would it cost to find hundreds of new car-parking spaces, to lay in extra bus routes, to put down massive electronic communication lines, power lines, sewage and ancillary works? How expensive would it really be to develop new streets or widen old ones, to build entrances and exits onto existing routes, to erect new sets of traffic lights, street lights and signs? Sure, what’s three or four or five hundred million euros between friends?

Then we can knock down the old RTÉ complex and build new houses or apartments through private contractors for another few hundred million euros, ensuring that it too has all new public utilities laid in. Oh yes, there will be knock-on effects in the Donnybrook locality, with thousands of students moving in, and perhaps families too, who will of course require new schools, doctors, shops, and… Well you get the idea. However I’m sure we can get it all done with only two or three years of construction works in the new and old neighbourhoods, and by the time we’ve spent several hundred million euros through central funding and higher taxation to pay for it we will certainly be able to make back maybe a hundred million. Or a little bit less.

“He said the BBC had a better location than RTÉ has, with its Shepherd’s Bush headquarters closer to London city centre.”

The BBC sold its Shepherd’s Bush studios in 2012. It’s London headquarters is actually at the ninety year old Broadcasting House, which was redeveloped from 2003 to 2013 at a cost of over €1.3 billion euros.

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2 comments

one really does wonder . . . . . Have any of these people any sense at all in their heads?or are they just flying kites for news space? the awful thing is that in a few years time this will most probably actually happen